5/23/11

Vice: When was the last time you ate some of the Devil’s Paper?Maggie Lee: I was taking Ambien and I accidentally took some acid—so I accidentally took acid in my sleep. I woke up and there was N2O, fruit candy, and chargers all over my floor. I had to go to Sheepshead Bay at 9 AM for a doctor’s appointment because I had gotten in a bike accident and fell on my arm. I was still tripping when I got to the doctor’s office.

V: Did you have any fucked up dreams?M: I think I stayed up all night. All I remember is everything being really warped and enhanced. Staying up on Ambien, even if acid is involved, is quite a forgettable experience.

V: The fashion shoot that accompanies our cover, “Dealer’s Delight,” is pretty great. What did you have in mind, just a couple of babes tripping? Or is there a deeper narrative?M: Thank you, I’m glad you liked it. It’s about naive girls tripping and being taken advantage of by a naughty dealer.

V: Taken advantage of in a “this acid sucks” sort of way, or in a rapey way?M: A rapey way.

5/18/11

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen============A month ago I heard folks talking online about a virtual currency called bitcoin that is untraceable and un-hackable. Folks were using it to buy and sell drugs online, support content they liked and worst of all -- gasp! -- play poker. Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.

After month of research and discovery, we’ve learned the following:

1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.

What Are Bitcoins?=========Bitcoins are virtual coins in the form of a file that is stored on your device. These coins can be sent to and from users three ways:

1. Direct with peer-to-peer software downloaded at bitcoin.org2. Via an escrow service like ClearCoin3. Via a bitcoin currency exchange

The Drug Underground and Bitcoin============Last month folks were buzzing about an online drug marketplace called SilkRoadMarket, which was reportedly trading in, well, all kinds of drugs: marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy and DMT.

Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.

5/17/11

Gysin was approached by various large companies, including the electronics giant, Philips, sniffing around the patenting possibilities of the machine which he and Sommerville had effectively invented out of nothing. ‘When I told them that it made people more awake,’ said Gysin later, ‘they lost interest. They were only interested in machines and drugs which made people go to sleep.’

If the Dreamachine is real, a non-habit forming, simple spinning dreambox that is capable of inducing a drugless high, why is it not available in your local department store? The answer would seem obvious. Look at the Financial Times and you will see that osome of the biggest companies in the world are chemical giants: I.C.I., Bayer, Hoffmann La Roche. Go to your G.P. and tell him that you are ill, and what will you get? Drugs. Seek a path out of everyday trivial reality and what will you be offered? Drugs. Drugs and their accompanying paraphernalia (and I include most doctors as an integral part of the paraphernalia) generate far more money in a drug dependent world.

1. The SituationDuring the last 4000 years a basic spiritual issue has been debated by those on the one hand who believe in the absolute validity of current relifious and scientific models (realists) and those who see these conventional models as flimsy game artifacts (sometimes useful, more often stifling) imposed on the evolving processes of life. The latter (called mystics, visionaries, nominalists, existentialists) are more concerned with man’s evoling spiritual potentialities than with his material or intellectual achievements.

5/11/11

"Reporters at Bin Laden's million-dollar hideout discovered small plots of marijuana growing in the deserted lots on the compound's perimeter. The dope plants were planted on three sides of the compound, alongside some less sexy crops such as cabbage and potatoes, CNN reported Tuesday. Despite Abbottabad's reputation as a military city, the discovery is not surprising.Pakistan makes about $4 billion a year from drug trafficking - though opium poppy is the drug-runners preferred crop." (NYDN)

once i was tripping with a good friend in berkeley, and we were sitting in her very small bedroom when an earthquake hit...first, we just thought it was the acid, but then we realized the house really was moving when stuff started falling down. we ran to the doorway, and stood there for about 20 minutes, before we realized we were being stupid.then we sat and wrote about our experiences:

Back wehre we started in the feral quake ridden air. My neck and jaw are very tense and my eyes are watery and i'm awake and yet another large part of me longs for sleep.Another part of me longs for food.Lots of food. FOOD NOW! Moo.

I keep waiting for something and it's not going to happen so why can't i just go to sleep? where is GODOT when you need him? waiting for an AP basketball card? YES!

My lip is so rubbery. MnhMy lhlhnlip bhbhis shslssoooooo phlrubbery.

I am a stickerI am forgottenI feel smoke from earlier this evening burning in my lungs...it's choking me I have to swallow a lot to keep it away.

The lines on the bed are glowing weirdly. I'm going to hug my bear now.

Suddenly I feel so alone, without my bear here! Why did i think i could hug my bear? "he was a hairy bear, he was a scary bear" he wasn't there.

*It's all been said twice before. A year ago arlene said the same thing. What _is_ it? and why is it following me? and why WHY won't it let me write in peace? It's called Alina in Hawaiian, but for now "it" sounds good to me.

5/5/11

They went inside the house, and into the middle bedroom where they found Thompson in a woman's panties and bra standing three feet from the goat's dead body. Thompson ran out of the house wearing only a muscle shirt and thong underwear.

5/3/11

She couldn't walk. She would get up to walk and she, she couldn't literally walk. It's like a robot. She couldn't even stand up. She couldn't think, she couldn't remember anything. You'd talk to her, she couldn't remember what you said two minutes before. And then you'd have to start all over again. And this went on for hours. We had her at the kitchen table for hours. And you don't know what to do. You don't know what to give 'em to counteract what's happening to them. You know, a person gets drunk, you feed 'em coffee, you know? Give 'em a couple of slices of bread. There's nothing you can do but let this thing wear off. And then, she didn't sleep - Triple C kept her awake. They don't sleep, they don't eat. And it goes on for hours, I guess, and it doesn't leave the body as quickly as you think it does. 'Cause the next day, she still wasn't right. It took days. (DXM Stories)

5/2/11

"LSD was, in the Grateful Dead world, a catalyst. For Lesh the highest he would ever get was during the Dead's 1966 sojourn in Los Angeles, when he and his love, Florence, Garcia and his lover, Diane Zellman, and a friend called "Heddie the Witch" went to a canyon on Mount Wilson and experience telepathy. Information came in extraordinarily fast bursts, ten minutes of material exploding into each brain in a few moments. It would be the closest Lesh would ever feel to Garcia off the stage, and it staggered him. They were well and truly connected. And then a test rocket at the nearby Rocketdyne facility exploded through the sky, severing their gestalt. It was, Garcia said, 'a reality butt splice.' Suddenly their trip was over. 'Sorry, kids. Go home.'"

- Dennis McNally, "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead"

“If the psychedelic experience is anything, it is spectacle, theatre, science fiction, the spiritual idea of death and rebirth, the word and painting revealing itself. It’s seeing the hidden meaning in language, the opening up the seed of consciousness to unlock the key to self.” - Ira Cohen

"Ira Cohen made phantasmagorical films that became cult classics. He developed a way of taking photographs in mesmerizing, twisting colors, including a famous one of Jimi Hendrix. He published works by authors like William Burroughs and the poet Gregory Corso. He wrote thousands of poems himself. He wrote “The Hashish Cookbook” under the name Panama Rose. He called himself “the conscience of Planet Earth.” But his most amazing work of art was inarguably Mr. Cohen himself. NY Arts magazine in 2008 called his life “a sort of white magic produced by an alchemist who turned his back on the establishment in order to find God, art and poetry.

He died of renal failure in Manhattan on April 25 at the age of 76, his family said.

Mr. Cohen made his Lower East Side loft an artists’ salon, then left to spend many years on pilgrimages to Marrakesh, Katmandu and the banks of the Ganges. He hung with Beats but rejected being called one. He was an entrepreneur of the arts who didn’t care about money. In the late 1960s, he returned to his loft and perfected his technique of photographing reflections on the surface of a polyester film with the trade name Mylar. Jimi Hendrix, of whom Mr. Cohen made a famous picture, likened the effect to “looking through butterfly wings. In 1968, Mr. Cohen made a 20-minute film using the Mylar technique, “The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda,” which has steadily risen in popularity. The original drummer of the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise, improvised the score, a smorgasbord of Tibetan, Moroccan and Druidic trance music." (NYT)

5/1/11

The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. Other people, going about their business on the streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously, into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now highly articulate vibration of every note played on an oboe or sung by a voice.

From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paper work with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will all be too late. Only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.

"Tomorrow never comes." I have never yet heard a preacher urging his congregation to practice that section of the Sermon on the Mount which begins, "Be not anxious for the morrow...." The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, "not quite all there"—or here: by over-eagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own advantages.

The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity. This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and female-and then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals, in-groups and out-groups.

Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull—as when you move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?

At first, this is a very odd sensation, not unlike hearing your own voice played back to you on an electronic system immediately after you have spoken. You become confused, and wait for it to go on! Similarly, you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet that the universe is equally something being done by you-which is true, at least in the neurological sense that the peculiar structure of our brains translates the sun into light, and air vibrations into sound.

Our normal sensation of relationship to the outside world is that sometimes I push it, and sometimes it pushes me. But if the two are actually one, where does action begin and responsibility rest? If the universe is doing me, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, I will still remember the English language? If I am doing it, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, my brain will know how to turn the sun into light? From such unfamiliar sensations as these, the psychedelic experience can generate confusion, paranoia, and terror-even though the individual is feeling his relationship to the world exactly as it would be described by a biologist, ecologist, or physicist, for he is feeling himself as the unified field of organism and environment.

The third characteristic, arising from the second, is awareness of relativity. I see that I am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and, maybe, to angels and gods-a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation. For example, the poor man worries about money while the rich man worries about his health: the worry is the same, but the difference is in its substance or dimension. I realize that fruit flies must think of themselves as people, because, like ourselves, they find themselves in the middle of their own world-with immeasurably greater things above and smaller things below. To us, they all look alike and seem to have no personality-as do the Chinese when we have not lived among them. Yet fruit flies must see just as many subtle distinctions among themselves as we among ourselves.

From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. As the French proverb goes, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more it varies, the more it is one). I see, further, that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself.

Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other"-to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the intellectual jump that mystical and psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling you to see that all these myriad I-centers are yourself—not, indeed, your personal and superficially conscious ego, but what Hindus call the paramatman, the Self of all selves. As the retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.

The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious e which equals mc2. This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur-but one sees quite clearly that all existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's own being. Of course there is death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves must have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off.

Basically, therefore, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is. Quoting Isaiah just a little out of context: "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create the darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things." This is the sense of the fundamental tenet of Hinduism, Tat tram asi—"THAT (i.e., "that subtle Being of which this whole universe is composed") art thou."A classical case of this experience, from the West, is in Tennyson's Memoirs:

"A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life."

Obviously, these characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as I have known it, are aspects of a single state of consciousness—for I have been describing the same thing from different angles. The descriptions attempt to convey the reality of the experience, but in doing so they also suggest some of the inconsistencies between such experience and the current values of society.